As Russia entered the nineteenth century, the hearts of earnest men must have sunk within them.  For Paul I, Catharine’s son and successor, was infinitely more despotic than Catharine, and infinitely less restrained by public opinion.  He had been born with savage instincts, and educated into ferocity.  Tyranny was written on his features in his childhood.  If he remained in Russia his mother sneered and showed hatred of him; if he journeyed in Western Europe crowds gathered about his coach to jeer at his ugliness.  Most of those who have seen Gillray’s caricature of him, issued in the height of English spite at Paul’s homage to Bonaparte, have thought it hideously overdrawn; but those who have seen the portrait of Paul in the Cadet-Corps of St. Petersburg know well that Gillray did not exaggerate Paul’s ugliness, for he could not.

And Paul’s face was but a mirror of his character.  Tyranny was wrought into his every fibre.  He demanded an oriental homage.  As his carriage whirled by, it was held the duty of all others in carriages to stop, descend into the mud, and bow themselves.  Himself threw his despotism into this formula:  “Know, Sir Ambassador, that in Russia there is no one noble or powerful except the man to whom I speak, and while I speak.”

And yet within that hideous mass glowed sparks of reverence for right.  When the nobles tried to get Paul’s assent to more open arrangements for selling serfs apart from the soil, he utterly refused; and when they overtasked their human chattels Paul made a law that no serf should be required to give more than three days in the week to the tillage of his master’s domain.  But, within five years after his accession, Paul had developed into such a ravenous wild beast that it became necessary to murder him.  This duty done, there came a change in the spirit of Russian sovereignty as from March to May; but, sadly for humanity, there came at the same time a change in the spirit of European politics, as from May to March.

For, although the new Czar, Alexander I, was mild and liberal, the storm of French ideas and armies had generally destroyed in monarchs’ minds any poor germs of philanthropy which had ever found lodgement there.  Still Alexander breasted this storm; found time to plan for his serfs, and in 1803 put his hand to the work of helping them toward freedom.  His first edict was for the creation of the class of “free laborers.”  By this, masters and serfs were encouraged to enter into an arrangement which was to put the serf into immediate possession of himself, of a homestead and of a few acres, giving him time to indemnify his master by a series of payments.  Alexander threw his heart into this scheme; and in his kindliness he supposed that the pretended willingness of the nobles meant something; but the serf-owning caste, without openly opposing, twisted up bad consequences with good, braided impossibilities into possibilities; the whole plan became a tangle, and was thrown aside.